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Note: This tutorial works on ROS Electric but has known issues in ROS Fuerte and ROS Groovy.

It is appreciated that problems/questions regarding this tutorial are asked on answers.ros.org. Don't forget to include in your question the link to this page, versions of your OS & ROS, and also add appropriate tags.

Introduction to Stage Controllers

Description: Stage (ver 3.0.0 and above) is equipped to work as standalone, wherein controllers integrated into stage enables motion, behaviour and processes for the robot(s). This tutorial discusses two such stage controllers.

Why Stage Controllers ?

Those of us who have used Stage (or Player/Stage) would have probably used Stage to set up the environment and the robot and then to implement behaviour used a C++ or Python code or another ROS node. However, from Stage ver 3.0.0 onwards there is a facility of Stage Controllers; which enables some very basic behaviour inbuilt into Stage. Thus, without using any other code script or ROS node it is possible to implement behaviour in the robot.

The primary motivation for such was to develop Stage as a swarm robotics simulator - implement same behaviour to a large number of robots all at the same time.